Related papers: How Developers Choose Names
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
Variable and function names are extremely important for program comprehension. It is therefore also important to study how developers select names. But controlled experiments on naming are hindered by the need to describe to experimental…
This paper describes the results of a large (+1100 responses) survey of professional software developers concerning standards for naming source code methods. The various standards for source code method names are derived from and supported…
Intermediate variables can be used to break complex expressions into more manageable smaller expressions, which may be easier to understand. But it is unclear when and whether this actually helps. We conducted an experiment in which…
Program code contains functions, variables, and data structures that are represented by names. To promote human understanding, these names should describe the role and use of the code elements they represent. But the names given by…
Unknowingly, identifiers in the source code of a software system play a vital role in determining the quality of the system. Ambiguous and confusing identifier names lead developers to not only misunderstand the behavior of the code but…
Identifier names play a significant role in program comprehension activities, with high-quality names improving developer productivity and system quality. To correct poor-quality names, developers rename identifiers to reflect their…
Consistency is one of the keys to maintainable source code and hence a successful software project. We propose a novel method of extracting the intent of programmers from source code of a large project (~300kLOC) and checking the semantic…
Identifier names, which comprise a significant portion of the codebase, are the cornerstone of effective program comprehension. However, research has shown that poorly chosen names can significantly increase cognitive load and hinder…
Comprehensibility of source code is strongly affected by identifier names, therefore software developers need to give good (e.g. meaningful but short) names to identifiers. On the other hand, giving a good name is sometimes a difficult and…
It is good practice to name test methods such that they are comprehensible to developers; they must be written in such a way that their purpose and functionality are clear to those who will maintain them. Unfortunately, there is little…
Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…
In software engineering (SE) tasks, the naming approach is so important that it attracts many scholars from all over the world to study how to improve the quality of method names. To accurately recommend method names, we employ a novel…
Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…
Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…
Background: The renaming of program identifiers is the most common refactoring operation. Because some identifiers are related to each other, developers may need to rename related identifiers together. Aims: To understand how developers…
A large-scale evaluation for current naming approaches substantiates that such approaches are accurate. However, it is less known about which categories of method names work well via such naming approaches and how's the performance of…
Unit tests are an important artifact that supports the software development process in several ways. For example, when a test fails, its name can provide the first step towards understanding the purpose of the test. Unfortunately, unit…
Method names play an important role in communicating the purpose and behavior of their functionality. Research has shown that high-quality names significantly improve code comprehension and the overall maintainability of software. However,…
In programming, the names for the program entities, especially for the methods, are the intuitive characteristic for understanding the functionality of the code. To ensure the readability and maintainability of the programs, method names…